This morning I noticed an interesting article on Medium, about Charles Darwin's note-making system, which the author described as being somewhat like a zettelkasten, and went on to compare the technique of “slips” with mind-mapping. I found it interesting that Swiss botanist Alphonse de Candolle (who coined the term taxonomy) praised as Darwin’s method as being much like his own, which had apparently had been pioneered by his father and used by the two for 80 years at the time of his writing:
Another friend and a contemporary of Darwin, The Swiss botanist Alphonse de Candolle, also wrote positively about Darwin’s note-taking method. In his book La Phytographie: Or, The Art Of Describing Plants Considered From Different Points Of View, de Candolle discussed the benefits of using slips of paper to record observations, a practice that he and his father had used in their own work. He noted that Darwin had independently developed the same method, and that he was “more impressed with it than ever”.
Here is an excerpt from de Candolle’s book (translated from the French):
“Mr. Darwin, whom I had the pleasure of seeing, used for his notes exactly the same method of loose slips that my father and I have followed, and which I have described in detail in my Phytographie. Eighty years of our experience have demonstrated to me its value. I am more impressed with it than ever, since Darwin devised it on his own. This method gives the work more accuracy, supplements memory, and saves years.”
The author suggests that part of Darwin's success lay in his thought process, which was enabled by an ability "to break down complex information into smaller, more manageable pieces and make connections between seemingly unrelated ideas." It stands to reason that you can't make innovative syntheses and comparisons, if you can't easily bring ideas to mind when they're needed and then manipulate them efficiently. This fits right in with what I've been thinking about the importance of paraphrasing and "translating" other people's ideas into something of our own. I think this is an under-appreciated aspect of the note-making process (right up there with indexing!) If we admit to ourselves that very little of what we think is 100% original and that we are inspired by all kinds of sources, then we can begin to be more deliberate about collecting these ideas in formats (chunks?) that make them easy to digest and repurpose. There’s an element of “atomicity” in this; also an element of abstraction. The thing you get out of the text is not necessarily the thing that was most important to its author, and that’s okay. This is the difference between strictly analytical reading and syntopical (what I call comparative) reading.